Supreme Court Rules States Cannot Remove Trump from Ballot

Welcome to the NewsHour. The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that the 14th Amendment does not allow individual states to remove former President Donald Trump from their ballots.

In an unsigned opinion, the court said only that Congress, not states, can disqualify presidential candidates under the Constitution's so-called Insurrection Clause. The former president celebrated the decision.

Essentially, you cannot take somebody out of a race because an opponent would like to have it that way and it has nothing to do with the fact that it's the leading candidate. Whether it was the leading candidate or a candidate that was well down on the totem pole, you cannot take somebody out of a race.

And William Brangham joins us now. So William, the court was unequivocal, states do not have the power to remove federal candidates from the ballot under the Insurrection Clause. Help us understand how the justices arrived at this ruling.

Remember Jeff, this came out of a group of Republican voters in Colorado saying that January 6th to their mind was clearly an insurrection, and that Donald Trump was the cheerleader of that insurrection. And they cited this Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which is, as you mentioned, the Insurrection Clause. And it argues that if you've sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and then you engage in an insurrection after the fact, you can't hold office again. And so, they appealed that all the way to the Colorado State Supreme Court and they won and Donald Trump was ruled that he has to be taken off the Republican primary ballot. (01:29) The Supreme Court is, they overturned that today. And they basically said you cannot have a system where a lot of different states are making this decision because it would simply be a sort of ad hoc state-by-state basis. In their ruling, they said, "For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the states. The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand." It said states can choose to withhold and withdraw state candidates, not federal candidates.

So tomorrow is Super Tuesday. Colorado is one of the many states holding a primary tomorrow, but the impact of this decision sweeps far beyond Colorado. Isn't that right?

That's exactly right. Trump will be on the ballot in Colorado. They printed the ballots already and thought, okay, if the ruling comes in the other direction, those votes just won't get counted. That doesn't matter now. As you mentioned, there are over 30 states that were examining some kind of a challenge on 14th Amendment grounds to pull Donald Trump off their ballots. All of those go away now. Trump will be on the ballot in all the states.

How did the court deal with the specific question of whether Donald Trump is an insurrectionist?

They didn't. They didn't bring it up in the hearing last month. They didn't bring it up in this ruling. There was some disagreement in the ruling today as to who gets to make that decision and when they make the decision. The four female justices, it was interesting how it split on gender lines here. All four female justices said that the ruling that states shouldn't be able to make this decision should have stood. But Kagan, Sotomayor, and Justice Jackson all took issue with the further breadth of this ruling, which they argue made it much harder to actually enforce Section 3 saying that Congress has to write a particular statute in order to enforce a part of the Constitution. It's very unusual. (03:26) These three justices wrote that the other justices crafted this ruling to insulate themselves and Donald Trump. I'm going to read a little bit of what they said. They wrote, "The majority announces novel rules for how that enforcement must operate. It reaches out to decide Section 3 questions not before us, and to foreclose future efforts to disqualify a presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case, crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course." They are clearly not happy with this. Something to remember when we see all these headlines that this was a unanimous ruling.

And separately, William, Allen Weisselberg, who is one of Donald Trump's longest-serving associates, he pleaded guilty today to perjury. Bring us up to speed on that case.

That's right. Weisselberg was, for almost 50 years, Donald Trump's chief financial guy. He got his start as Fred Trump's, Donald Trump's father's bookkeeper. He admitted that he lied under oath, he lied to investigators and on the stand as part of this big sweeping civil fraud trial that just socked Donald Trump with nearly half a billion dollars in fines. In that ruling, the civil fraud ruling, the judge in that case ruled that Weisselberg was central to all of the different fraudulent things that Donald Trump got up to, banned him from serving as a financial officer, said he's got to pay back half the $2 million severance that Donald Trump gave him when he was walking out the door. So now that he's pled guilty to perjury, he could spend a couple of months in prison, notably in this case and all along and this has been an incredible frustration to prosecutors in this case, Weisselberg has never implicated Donald Trump in any wrongdoing.

All right, William Brangham, thank you so much for all of that reporting this evening. We appreciate it.

Thanks, Jeff.